M.J. Di Rocco takes on a challenge with “Ashita”

by Chris MaGee

Ever since I started The J-Film Pow-Wow I've been aware of Toronto writer and director M.J. Di Rocco. He and I had bonded over our love of Japanese cinema and I'd had my curiosity peaked by the snippets I'd seen of the film he was working on, six separate stories about the Japanese in North America, each of them shot entirely in Japanese, so I was thrilled when he agreed to let me sit down with him and his editor Andy Bely to get an exclusive first look at his Di Rocco's third feature film "Ashita: Six Stories of Tomorrow".

From the story of three former members of a girl pop group who've reunited for a friend's wedding only to have their friendship tested by long buried secrets in "Cream Puff Explosion" to the heartwarming depiction of a mute artist who must use his drawings to communicate his true feelings to the woman next door in "The Wonderful Elton Fuji" I was impressed how Di Rocco gave his characters room to breath, giving us the flipside of the "gaijin in Japan" genre epitomized by Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation", allowing us the chance to view the West through the eyes of Japanese, traveling and living (often alone) in North America. “Obviously when you go somewhere by yourself and you don't know anyone the first thing you do is to try and look for someone you can relate to," explains Di Rocco.

Most impressive was the story "The Gift" that features Japanese-Canadian artist tomolennon as a man who has traveled all the way to Canada to finalize his divorce from his wife, a woman (played by Jenny Tamaki) whose sense of identity and sanity has suffered from her yawning sense of separation. "Emotions you can tell in any language," Di Rocco commented as we came to the frightening end of the segment, "The divorce, if you don't put the subtitles in you know what is happening," and it's that universal human quality, the universal dilemma of being so far out of your element that is at the heart of "Ashita".

"Why do people go anywhere? Why do people move here? Why do Japanese move here?" Di Rocco starts to wonder out loud, one of many times his enthusiasm bursts through during our afternoon together, "Some of them may very well be running away in the case of the story of 'The Gift'. She is running away. She wants to do things that you can't really do in Japan or aren't socially acceptable in Japan . Other people just come here to learn English." But the question of why people do the things they do could easily be applied to Di Rocco himself: why would an Italian-Canadian filmmaker from Montreal make a film entirely in Japanese? "I could have easily made the film in English, French or Italian, which are languages I'm fluent in, but I figured no, I want to try doing something in a language I don't fully understand."

It's that sense of challenge, of an "experiment" that seems to drive Di Rocco with "Ashita"; and it's also one of the main reasons why Andy Bely, who’s previously worked on such films as “John Q” and “Arlington Road” came on board as editor. "I show up at Andy's, 'Here's 42 hours of footage. In Japanese. Cut it!'” explains Di Rocco with a laugh, “Well, he has to figure out how am I going to understand what the hell is going on?" The solution: Di Rocco enlisted the help of his wife, Izumi, who provided a recorded dub of the footage so Bely would know the best places to edit.

But Izumi Di Rocco’s involvement just didn’t begin and end with assisting Bely with the language barrier. She not only stars in the segment titled “3 Girls”, but in many ways she was the muse for the project. “Ashita came at a happy time in my life. I had been married for almost a year to my lovely wife Izumi. We got married in Japan and I fell in love with the country and the culture. I knew I wanted to work on a Japanese project,” so after some discussion with his mother-in-law, a theatrical producer, director and actor in Kyushu Di Rocco set to work in the summer of 2006 writing, then casting his cinematic “experiment”, but it wasn’t always easy. “It's not everyday that you have a white director, a white editor and 35 Japanese crew people.”

The big hurdle was talent, “You have to consider the logistics of it. Here I am in Toronto wanting to shoot a movie in Japanese, now I'm going to go have to find a cast of 21 professional actors from Japan ... Not going to happen,” so the decision was made to go with a cast made up almost entirely of untrained actors, “I think all of them pulled off extraordinary performances, never having acted before, never been on camera before,” and again Izumi helped in the process of assembling a truly impressive collection of both the local and international Japanese arts scene to work on the film: painters tomolennon and Daisuke Takeya, dancer and choreographer Keiko Ninomiya, Sayaka, the lead singer of the band Supergirl Juice and Don Matsuo and his band The Zoobombs. “[Izumi would say] ‘Oh, I know her, we need to hang out’ and it became this little circle of the Japanese community.”

It’s this who’s who of the Japanese arts community that has both the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and the Toronto office of The Japan Foundation interested in screening the film once it’s completed. When I asked Di Rocco when that might be he joked, “Between now and 2020!” but thankfully we won’t have to wait that long. “My dream come true would be [to feature it] at the Tokyo International film festival,” but Di Rocco is anxious to have “Ashita” screen locally as soon as he can, “2009 hopefully.”

Check out the trailer for "Ashita: Six Stories of Tomorrow" below: